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ISRAEL is deploying a power ful new secret weapon with its frontline forces in Gaza. Problem is, the innovation is going to help Hamas – the enemy in the attrition war raging along the terror-infested southern border.

In one of the biggest absurdities in its ineffective, self-defeating actions in Gaza, Israel is replacing warriors with lawyers.

Hundreds of them, and not only from the government’s traditionally obstructionist attorney general’s office, but from the active-duty and reserve ranks of the military.

Dozens of these lawyers – usually professional officers ranking from captain to colonel – work every day on planning and managing Israel’s counter-terror war.

And they don’t only offer legal advice. They’re key players in war rooms from the General Staff’s underground “pit” in Tel Aviv right down through forward-deployed brigades with the authority to approve targets and even abort operations in progress.

Consider last week.

The Israeli Defense Forces had launched a four-day incursion into northern Gaza aimed at destroying the increasingly lethal, long-range rockets that have rendered life intolerable for the 160,000 citizens unfortunate enough to reside within 12 miles of the border. But the lawyers intervened at least twice in (unintentional) support of the enemy.

First, they forced the IDF’s Southern Command to surrender the element of surprise by warning specific apartment blocks of impending attack. Then they ordered a halt to airstrikes once Hamas sent in innocents as human shields in the Israelis’ crosshairs.

An IDF officer said no operation is too small to escape legalistic micromanagement: “It’s really unbelievable. These guys are monitoring live video feeds from the field and giving the thumbs up or thumbs down to ongoing ops,” he said.

No wonder Gazans responded with taunting cheers when Israel recalled its forces on Monday from an operation (codenamed Hot Winter) that failed once again to halt or even much mute rocket launches. A day later, IDF infantry and armored bulldozers returned for another night of destroy and arrest operations, but retreated by daybreak.

After nearly a week of continuous ground warfare, the IDF managed to destroy several caches of homemade Qassam rockets and confiscate rocket-propelled grenades and explosives-rigged cellphones hidden in a mosque. It also killed dozens of terrorists and brought back truckfuls of suspects for Shin Bet interrogation.

But the ground troops didn’t find the imported Iranian 122-millimeter, theater-expanding Grad rockets that prompted the escalation in the first place. (The IDF did destroy several from the air.)

In the process, Israel lost two soldiers and ended up killing a significant (still disputed) number of Palestinian innocents.

But the self-imposed lawyer-driven handicap that hampered effective warfare didn’t spare the IDF from international reproof. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned Israel for using excessive force, while an Amnesty International-led coalition faulted Israel’s punitive closure of Gaza for fomenting the worst humanitarian situation there since 1967.

Even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rapped Israel’s knuckles for the four-day ground offensive, telling reporters Wednesday at a Jerusalem press conference: “As Israel defends itself, Israel also needs to be very careful about innocent people who get caught in the crossfire, and about the humanitarian conditions in Gaza.”

Will the boomerang experience of Operation Hot Winter deter future frontline IDF use of its attorney brigade? Hardly. Even now, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and top advisers are haggling with lawyers over permission to use artillery to pound the irrepressible, martyr-aspiring militants into submission.

And in a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, Israeli Attorney General Manny Mazuz faced down Barak (Israel’s most decorated war hero), Vice Premier Haim Ramon and other heavyweights who proposed a retaliation policy – launching multiple artillery rounds back for each Qassam fired from heavily populated Gaza.

In an account carried in several local dailies, Ramon derided Israeli high-minded jurists who “don’t know how to demonstrate the public courage” required to halt the rocket attacks. The reported retort from Israel’s top lawyer: “No jurist, no matter which country he comes from, is able to turn international law on its head.”

Certainly Israel must not exceed the outer parameters of international law with unprovoked, intentionally indiscriminate attacks on innocents. But the IDF is fighting an enemy that uses mosques, high-rise apartments and even schools as launching pads for its own indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.

In an ugly war against law-mocking terrorists, Israel can’t afford to let its own lawyers rob it of legitimate, defensive maneuvering room.